Sergio Abranches

Looking at the sequence of extreme weather events from 2005 to the beginning of 2011 it seems clear that any trend analysis or future scenario has to look at climate change as a central driver.A few years ago a friend of mine, an economist who runs a successful consultancy business, asked for a meeting to discuss my view on climate change. He was intrigued by the fact that, knowing my work as a political risk analyst, I have started to write extensively about climate change. Especially my journalistic commentaries have centered, for several years now, on climate change and related issues.

I argued that looking at long range scenarios to assess forthcoming risks I realized that climate change had become a unremovable driver. In the 1980’s, one could still find 30-50 year scenarios that looked at climate change as a variable. At least one scenario would not feature climate change, and this absence would be one of the factors that would distinguish it from the other scenarios. From the 1990’s onwards one could not find any credible long-run scenario that did not take climate change into account. In other words no story about the next three or four decades would be credible if it did not include climate change. Scenarios can vary widely when other factors are examined. Climate change has to be in all, and can only credibly vary regarding its intensity, and the different solutions envisaged.

He told me that he was beginning to see it, when analyzing long-term agricultural trends.

Yesterday he coined a catch-phrase for one of his analysis looking at supply, demand and price trends: “extreme weather used to be a random factor, and has now become a permanent one because of climate change”. Maybe it has never been a totally random factor. But it is clear that it has been a permanent feature over the last few years.

I’ve looked at extreme weather events from 2005 to the beginning of this year, and was able to make an extensive list covering these seven years. For all of them I could list heavy storms; floods and landslides; anomalously cold or hot winters; heat and cold waves; severe droughts. Anomalies could be found in all years, and all around the world. A good aggregation from 2005 to 2009 here. For 2010, an year of extremes, two good sources are here and here. Another good source, from the insurance industry here. This year began with some deadly weather events in Sri Lanka, Australia, and Brazil.

This sequence of extreme events over seven straight years has had a disruptive effect on agricultural supplies. Demand continued to grow, but crop failures due to the weather has reduced global supplies. Prices have increased feeding a weather-related food price inflation. It seems sensible to admit that weather extremes have become a driver no mid to long-term agricultural scenario can disregard. it also means that agribusiness will have to invest in adaptation. Some migration of agricultural production from risky to safer areas is becoming likely. Obviously the reach of the climate driver goes far beyond agriculture. Loss of lives, infrastructure and property was widespread. Extreme weather raises the risk of disasters everywhere, and adaptation has become a general need. The insurance industry has introduced the climate driver in its calculus long ago. Cities are already preparing themselves for present and future events resulting of changing climate patterns.

No risk or trend analysis will make sense if it doesn’t take climate change as a permanent and ubiquitous driver.

It is in our power to eradicate poverty by 2050; it is in our power to eradicate disease by 2050; but it is also in our power to destroy ourselves by 2050.” (Ian Goldin)

The Royal Geographic Society has hosted , last September, a panel discussion on “The World in 2050”, with scientific experts from the 21st Century School.

The event was a joint endeavor of the James Martin 21^st Century School and Intelligence². Panelists were Ian Goldin, director of the the 21st Century School at the University of Oxford; Malcolm MacCulloch, director of the School’s Institute for Carbon and Energy Reduction in Transport; Sara Harper, director of the Oxford Institute of Ageing; and Julian Savulescu, director of the School’s Programme on Ethics of the New Biosciences.

In many places, academic institutions, corporations, NGOs, think tanks, numerous people study, research, and discuss future trends. In daily social life, however, in the media in general, and in the governments of almost all countries, the long-term, envisioning the future, is a lateral, peripheral section of the agenda. Is is not a priority. We’re tied to the short-term, to the joys and tribulations of our daily life; to the immediate  policy agenda. However, disregarding the future, failing to look ahead and to focus the uncertainties and possibilities beyond the horizon of our daily obligations is riskier than one can imagine. To be the able to take our destiny in our hands, we’ve got to have a vision for the future, a long view.

Stewart Brand, one of the founders of the Long Now Foundation, reminds us in his book “The Clock of the Long Now: Time and Responsibility”, that

“time is asymmetrical to us. We can see the past but not influence it. We can influence the future, but we cannot see it. Both the invisibility and potential malleability of the future draw us to lean into it, alert to threat or opportunity, empowered by the blankness of its page (if the future is not determined, we might do anything).”

He also teaches us that “rigorous long-view thinking makes responsibility taking inevitable because it responds to the slower, deeper feedback loops of the whole society and the natural world.” Ultimately, it is clear that “in the long run, saving yourself means saving the whole world.”

Perhaps the best introduction to this panel is the concluding remark by Ian Goldin, on his presentation:

“It is in our power to eradicate poverty by 2050; it is in our power to eradicate disease by 2050; but it is also in our power to destroy ourselves by 2050.”

I hope this is justification enough to persuade those who visit this page to watch the video.

When Cop 10 failed in Buenos Aires, December 2004, there were two culprits for the deadlock of climate change negotiations: the US and G77. Bangkok ended deadlocked last September. The main agents leading to the standoff were the US and G77. The US, however, had completely changed its attitude towards a global climate change deal.

Sergio Abranches

At the time, Italy’s Environment Minister, had proposed that the Kyoto Protocol be abandoned by 2012, if a new and broader agreement were not possible. It was an act of protest against US vetoes, and the announcement by the UK and Japan that they would not be able to meet the meager Kyoto emissions reduction goals.

Cut. Bangkok, October 2009. The last preparatory meeting before COP 15, in Copenhagen fails. Reason: conflict between the US and G 77, with China leading the confrontation for the “small states league”. The US was pushing  for a replacement to the Kyoto Protocol. The G77 defended its permanence. It wanted the maintenance of the Protocol’s outdated bipolarity: “Annex I countries”, with binding commitments, and “Non-Annex I countries”, with no obligations. US criticism of the Kyoto Protocol is fully correct and has the agreement of the European Union. Kyoto is outdated. It has never worked properly.

The G77 major countries know that this group of countries makes even less sense than the Kyoto Protocol. They argue that Kyoto would be replaced by a lax scheme, with no clear obligations and no guarantees. But that is what the Kyoto Protocol has become. What’s being proposed is quite different: an ambitious deal, with much higher targets for reducing emissions, including binding commitments for the emerging powers: China, India and Brazil, in particular. These big emitters are using a bad geopolitical fiction called G77 to evade their obligations.

COP 10 was held on a different world. The UK, then unable to meet the dismal Kyoto targets, is today ahead of most other European countries in its endeavors to mitigate GHG emissions. Japan’s new prime minister, Yukio Hatoyama, announced last September, at New York’s climate change summit, that his Administration will commit to a 25% reduction of 1990 emissions by 2020. In the COP 10 world, Japan was defaulting Kyoto. Barack Obama’s election has removed the US veto to an ambitious climate deal. For the first time there is a present and concrete chance that the US could have e federal climate change law.

Brazil had, in 2004, a per capita income of US$ 7,770.00 (by purchasing power parity criteria – ppp). Its Human Development Index was 0,775. Today, its per capita income is US$ 9,577.00, and its HDI, 0,813. At COP 10, in Buenos Aires, Brazil worked most of the time shifting positions as mouthpiece for G-77 with Tanzania (per capita income of US$ 580.00 -US$ 1208.00, in 2007- and HDI of 0,407 – 0,530, in 2009). That was signal enough there was something weird about this group of countries. Brazil and Tanzania have never had common interests regarding GHG emissions, or economic development issues. Their agenda was, and continues to be, totally different.

Brazil could only find itself at home among most of the G77 countries by sheer opportunism. The same is true for China. I’m talking about countries such as Tanzania, Burundi (per capita income: US$ 630.00, in 2004, and US$ 341.00, today; HDI: 0,339 e 0,394, respectively), Democratic Republic of Congo (per capita income: US$ 650.00 and US$ 298.00; HDI: 0,365 and 0,389), Ethiopia ( p/c income: US$ 780.00 and US$ 779.00; HDI: 0,359 and 0,414) or Haiti (p/c income: US$ 1610.00 and US$ 1155.00; HDI: 0,463 e 0,532).

The G-77 is one of those relics the United Nations preserves. It has actually much more than 77 states today. They are already 130. It might as well be called the G-130: a disjointed set of heterogenous countries created in 1964, in an even more distant world, of Cold War, communist countries, and latino military dictatorships.

Brazil was then a Third World dictatorship, with a modest and closed economy. China wasn’t even dreaming of a process of economic opening and modernization that would turn it into a powerhouse of the capitalist world.

Such a disparate group of nation-states has no capability to define a proactive agenda related to social and economic development, even less a climate change agenda. It is, by definition, a veto group.

Sociologically speaking this amorphous mix has countries with tiny populations like the Maldives’ 300 thousand people, and mega-populations like China’s 1.4 billion. It puts together urban and rural countries; industrialized and industrializing ones. Their per capita incomes vary from Zimbabwe’s US$ 261.00, to Brunei Darussalam’s U$ 30,000.00. What could those countries have in common?

When the G-77 was created, the Brazilian population was growing at 3% a year; the birth rate was on average 6 births per female; its urban population was only 50% of a 78.6 million population; infant mortality was 116:1000; adult literacy was 55%; and per capita income was US$ 1,400.00.

Today, Brazilian urban population is 85% of a total of 114 million people; annual population growth is 1.2% and the birth rate is under 2 children per female. Infant mortality has dropped to 23,6:1000, 80% less. Adult literacy is 90%. Per capita income has increased sixfold.

Changes in China have been even more impressive, although they don’t show as much because of the enormous absolute size of its population.

Brazil cannot keep hiding behind 120 poor countries to evade its responsibilities for global climate change. The same is true to China, and to India. They belong to a different league. One that the financial market has come to know as “BRIC countries”, the intermediate economic powers of today, the stardom of the emerging markets. These countries may become mega-economies, in less than three decades, and are already large GHG emitters.

In Goldman Sachs’s study, the economists who concocted the acronym “BRIC”, to refer to Brazil, Russia, India and China, estimated that in less than 40 years, their GDP would sum more that G-6’s GDP. Only the US and Japan would have economies as large as theirs. The US would be the second largest, after China, and Japan, the fourth, after India, but still ahead of Brazil, the fifth, and Russia, the sixth.

The BRIC league would grow from 15% of G-6’s present economic power to more than 50% by 2025. The growth rates necessary to achieve this status conform to a less than best case scenario. Brazil would need an annual average growth rate of 4%, over the next four decades, to get there. China would have to sustain an average annual growth of between 7% and 8%, over the first 10 years, reducing progressively to less than 5%, to end the period growing between 3% and 4%. India would have to grow by at least 5% every year during the next 40 years.

In spite of having around 15% of G6’s GDP today, they represent about 30% of global GHG emissions. Almost half of that emission comes from China. Even looking at per capita emissions, these three countries are much larger emitters that most of the G77’s 127 other nations.

We’ve got to separate the emerging powers from the smaller G77 countries. Those who belong to the G20, a geopolitical grouping that makes far more sense, and to MEF, the Major Economies Forum, created by President Obama, should leave the G77. The MEF will meet next November, in the UK, to try to solve the deadlock preventing an ambitious global climate change deal in Copenhagen’s COP15. It would be a good opportunity for China, Brazil and India stop behaving as small league players, and take obligations proportional to their actual size.

Sergio Abranches

Chief US Climate negotiator Todd Stern’s statement at the House Select Committee for Energy Independence and Global Warming that “the tenor of negotiations in the formal U.N. track has been difficult,” was only the most recent warning of a dimming prospect for an effective deal in Copenhagen.

Stern also urged the US Senate to “do its part to move this process forward in a timely manner. Nothing the United States can do is more important for the international negotiation process than passing robust, comprehensive clean energy legislation as soon as possible.”

Meanwhile, new scientific evidence, and stronger scientific warnings indicate we are approaching a point of no return on global warming. The Royal Society recently issued a report saying that “it is likely that global warming will exceed 2°C this century unless global greenhouse gas emissions are cut by at least 50% of 1990 levels by 2050, and by more thereafter.” The report adds that “unless future efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions are much more successful then they have been so far, additional action may be required should it become necessary to cool the Earth this century.” We’ll need a “Plan B”, involving geoengineering, “the deliberate large-scale intervention in the Earth’s climate system, in order to moderate global warming.”

The Royal Society calls for substantial research funding to study the use and consequences of geoengineering. It proposes the development of “a code of practice for geoengineering research,” and provides recommendations for a voluntary research governance framework. John Shepherd, who chaired the Royal Society study, said geoengineering may become “the only option left to limit further temperature increases.”

This outlook points to a “tragic choice” between the climatic consequences of unmitigated global warming, and the risks of geoengineering. Shepherd noted that their research “found that some geoengineering techniques could have serious unintended and detrimental effects on many people and ecosystems.”

One of the panels I sat at the American Political Science Association’s Annual Meeting, in Toronto (September 3-6), was on “Geoengineering and Global Order.” Political Scientist and author Thomas F. Homer-Dixon, of the University of Waterloo, pointed out that, since the drivers of global warming are stronger than mitigating factors, “the precautionary principle requires us to aggressively research geoengineering and be prepared to use it extensively.” He recommends we make sure we have all arrows in our quiver, and geoengineering is one of them.

Physicist Jason Blackstock, a Research Scholar at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, cautions that there is significant uncertainty on the spatial and temporal response of the most promising geoengineering technologies, making their near-term deployment extraordinarily risky.

The methods the scientific community considers the most promising are Shortwave Climate Engineering. According to Blackstock basic physical science, exploratory climate modeling, and the impacts of volcanic aerosols on climate all suggest that this method could partially compensate for some effects of increased atmospheric CO2, particularly net global warming. Existing data “also reveal important limits to the range of CO2 impacts that it could ameliorate.”

Blackstock argues for increased research on the possibilities and risks of geoengineering, since we might need to use it as a last resort. Undesirable consequences will, however, be unavoidable, and they’ll do more harm to countries in the tropical belt, that are not interested or cannot afford to study these methods of intervention in the climate system.

The conclusion is that “we might have to choose another type of climate change instead of the one we’re now heading to.” This sort of “tragic choice dilemma” requires a prompt answer to the unsolved problems regarding the international governance of geoengineering research. He argued we need to start studying fast and efficiently who does this research; how, when, under which conditions, and by whom this knowledge will be appropriated and used.

Blackstock is co-author of the report “Climate Engineering Responses to Climate Emergencies,” indicating that “the climate system might be inherently too complex—and therefore the possibility of ‘unanticipated harmful side effects’ too large—for any intentional human intervention to ever be considered safe.” A point he has also stressed on his presentation at the APSA panel. Another relevant risk from geoengineering is moral hazard: that it can be perceived as a substitute for greenhouse gases emissions reduction and serve as a justification to delay action. The “climate skeptics” are already defending this solution. Additionally, “significant international tensions might emerge surrounding who gets to define what the ‘optimum’ climate should be,” the report says.

Are we really heading towards this catastrophic scenario, where we’ll have to choose the climate change we have been causing with our GHG emissions, or the climate change we’ll generate by trying to engineer the climate system?

If the rate of emissions does not come radically down within the next three to four decades, the answer is likely to be yes. Some analysts are convinced we can no longer avoid a climatic cataclysm. At the panel “Adapting to or Avoiding Doomsday: Dealing with Climate Change”, also at APSA, Wolfgang Brauner, political scientist of the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth, suggested that even “maximum mitigation is unlikely to avoid catastrophic climate change”, and it would “overwhelm the adaptive capacity and resilience of social, political and economic systems.” We would be facing a likely temperature rise around 4^oC, moving essentially into uncharted territory.

This scenario seems too pessimistic, but the fact is that we are not making any progress so far to avoid it. I talked at the panel “It is not easy going green,” about how it would be advantageous to Brazil to build a low carbon economy. The costs of this conversion would be comparatively low because of the country’s relatively clean energy matrix, and most of its emissions come from deforestation and degradation. Yet, the dominant political and business elite resists such change.

Wei Liang, from the Monterey Institute of International Studies, showed that, in spite of the environmental costs the country is facing, the Chinese government will not take any steps to join a climate deal that might impair the country’s development over the short run.

In the US, the Senate has delayed action on the climate bill. The US Chief Climate Negotiator says negotiations are at a dangerous standstill. This is also the opinion of UK Foreign Secretary, David Miliband. A few days ago he has warned of a “real danger that negotiations to tackle climate change could collapse, with catastrophic consequences.”

Looking at the very few panels dedicated to climate change at the APSA meeting, one might get the impression that US political science deems it to be the greater challenge of our time. This is not the case. APSA’s president, Peter Katzenstein, didn’t even mention it on his “presidential address”. He lectured the audience on: “Those People: Contrasting Perspectives on World Politics.” It is fair to suppose he talked about the most relevant issues on world politics. Climate change was not among those issues. Not one of the plenary sessions was dedicated to the discussion of climate change. Of the 1082 papers uploaded to the

Social Science Research Network’s site dedicated to the meeting, less than 1% dealt with the global warming challenge.

It seems the establishment of the US political science does not consider global warming and its climatic consequences to be a core problem to be addressed by the discipline as a whole. The notion that the US should lead talks towards an ambitious climate change deal is at odds with the apparent alienation of its political science establishment regarding the most dangerous governance problem of the 21st century.  As we know, the academic political science elite in the US is representative of the frame of mind of the governing elite.

It seems that we should start considering the hypothesis that “doomsday scenarios” are becoming more realistic than “positive change scenarios”, given this environment of blocked politics and climate change alienation among some of the major mature and emerging powers.

Sergio Abranches

What if we are living now at the edge of tremendous changes and breakthroughs that will lead the humankind to evolve faster than ever along the twenty-first century? What if we are at the edge of a tipping-point in the history of humankind?

Mathematician and sci-fi writer Vernor Vinge wrote, back in 1993, that acceleration of technological progress has taken us to “the edge of change comparable to the rise of human life on Earth.”  Vinge, one of the first writers to envisage cyberspace, wrote on an essay for NASA in 1993, later published by the Whole Earth Review, that the cause of this sweeping change would be “the imminent creation by technology of entities with greater than human intelligence.” He called this tipping point a singularity.

A singularity, in physics, in astronomy, is where the laws of physics as we know them break down. My friend Ulisses Leitão, professor of Physics and Linux evangelist, tells me that the greatest singularity, is the Big Bang moment: “density would be so high, tending to infinity, that present Physics would not be able to describe its physical behavior. It would require a unified theory of all fundamental forces of Nature: electromagnetic, strong nuclear, weak nuclear and gravitational. A theory encompassing Quantum Physics (small dimensions), Relativistic (high energy), and Universal Gravitation (large distances). “This theory doesn’t exist, we’ve been searching for it for the last 60 years…” If the search is possible, i.e. if we have the tools to search for it, than, in the long run, the theory is possible. That’s the point to me.

Vinge thinks that technological singularity means a moment beyond which huge, but unpredictable, changes occur, as John Hind explains on an article for the Guardian, in 2002. On his original presentation of singularity, Vernor Vinge said that “when greater-than-human intelligence drives progress, that progress will be much more rapid.” He went even farther: “there seems no reason why progress itself would not involve the creation of still more intelligent entities, on a still-shorter time scale.” That is thinking as creatively about the future as possible.

Envisaging inevitable surprises we can anticipate without ever knowing in advance their consequences to us, as Peter Schwartz proposes in his 2003 book Inevitable Surprises: Thinking Ahead in a Time of Turbulence, is also about creative thinking. They are two different and equally valid ways of thinking about a “history” for the future that is boldly visionary and technically sound.

Inevitable surprises we can anticipate, as hypothesized by Peter Schwartz, are not in contradiction with the possibility that we are plunging into a singularity, a whirlpool of vertiginous change. The former tells us about changes we can anticipate, but not know its consequences. The latter tells about a tipping point after which change will accelerate beyond imagining to arrive at a quantum leap on human evolution that goes beyond everything we’ve known so far.

The difference is that one way of thinking points to the possibility of anticipating the changes that could create the means for the emergence of singularity. The other invites us to try to anticipate the broader consequences of these events. To look at the time, Vinge invites us, “where our old models must be discarded and a new reality rules.” From the human point of view this change will be “a throwing away of all the previous rules, perhaps in the blink of an eye, an exponential runaway beyond any hope of control.”

Can you imagine how much controversy this idea has created in the academic and intellectual circles more than 15 years ago? Reaction to the singularity hypothesis was widespread. Supporters have also multiplied. Social scientist Robin Hanson once collected several comments on Vinge’s singularity. One comment has direct implications for the whole idea of looking into the future: it stated that nothing is certain, we’re always dealing with hypothesis. Nick Bostrom, director of the Future of Humanity Institute said that he did not “regard the singularity as being a certainty, just one of the more likely scenarios”.

Singularity has raised controversy since the first time Vernor Vinge used the idea, fictionally and rather diffusely, on a novel, Marooned In Real Time. On the story, a character says, at a certain point of the plot: “It was the Singularity, a place where extrapolation breaks down and new models must be applied. And those new models are beyond our intelligence.” It is a breaking point, a paradigm shift beyond the concepts we’re used to. Similar to the passage from the Middle Ages to the Enlightenment.

It is easy to understand why all the controversy. We are talking about two orders of unknowns and neither is really easy to look into. The future is an entertaining idea until we start to realize it points to our ineluctable finitude. We have to make ourselves comfortable with the idea of looking beyond ourselves and our beloved ones. Singularity radicalizes this vision. It points beyond human dominance in the universe. Not comfortable at all. Ray Kurzweil and several others took this idea much further, into the real of transhumanism. But that’s far beyond my view.

Stewart Brand has a point worth recalling in his The Clock of the Long Now: time is asymmetrical to us. We can see the past but we can’t change it. Yet we still argue about the past, I’d add. We cannot see the future, he continues, but we can influence it. He is not implying we can control the way future events will unfold. It is not about trying to control the future, but trying to give it, i.e. to future generations, the tools to help itself.

Isn’t that precisely what we are trying to do about climate change? We know, or most of us know, we cannot control natural laws. There is very little we can do with the tools we have today about the amount of GHG we’ve already sent to our atmosphere, or the global warming we’ve already bought with the carbon we’ve emitted so far. We can develop tools to adapt human society to these very likely events, though. We can develop tools and the required means of governance to reduce future emissions and avoid worst case scenarios.

None of these challenges is about certainty, about knowing beyond any doubt. Certainty will always fall within the realm of our finitude. It is about uncertainty, risk, chances we should no take. We can estimate probabilities and educatedly guess probable consequences. To do that we must look into the future, and doing it with art, creativity, imagination and boldness helps a lot. Worst than to reveal good and bad things that might be brewing in our future, would be to make these views dull and obvious.

I, for myself, as far as climate change is concerned, would rather be warned of risk greater than what is most likely to happen than to be informed of risk that might fall short of probable outcomes. The same is true for me regarding the future history of this century. I’d rather think that humankind will have overcome its frailties, brutality and insensitiveness; learn solidarity to the sufferings of those different from oneself; domesticate the propensity of the powerful to oppression and of the rich to amass far more wealth they can manage; than to imagine it will be all the same in 2100.

There is a tipping point looming on the horizon of our future. It may not have anything to do with Vinge’s singularity. We can only be sure of one thing: change will be overwhelming and our old models will have to be discarded, a new reality will rule.

An excellent brief interview with Jamais @cascio on future thinking and foresight as a sort of immune system for our civilization. It is a good metaphor, as it puts together the two major functions of scenario design: adopting a long view to look at risks mostly those yet invisible at first sight, and thinking about long term ways to manage those risks. Thinking ahead of present circumstances, helps us to envision paths for the development of new solutions to new problems or to enduring problems.

More thoughts by Jamais Cascio at Open Future.